Tim Wu explains why the only way for capitalism to flourish in the future is by decentralizing; Marci Shore encounters Ukrainian thinkers under fire; John Summers tells a true story highly unflattering to God; Michael Ignatieff wonders how to lead a liberal life; James Wolcott has his way with the celebrity worship at the New York Times; Maurice Isserman warns about the direction of the contemporary American left; Sally Satel documents the politicization of American psychotherapy; Len Gutkin reckons with the cultural cost of secularism; Robert Alter unpacks the literary greatness of the book of Job; Elena Kagan insists on giving William Wyler his due; Celeste Marcus takes a hard look at the debate about rape in war; Leon Wieseltier ponders the ways in which metaphysics makes life in the physical world bearable.
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March 2025
Once upon a time, democracy excited the American imagination. When Thomas Mann toured the United States in the spring of 1938 with a lecture on “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” his audiences averaged somewhere between two thousand and seven thousand people at a time. In New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, Chicago,...
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The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second administration have been characterized, among other things, by an obscene display of policing power, one that has largely alarmed liberals because it appears completely lawless. One of Trump’s initial acts was pardoning and commuting people convicted of crimes related to January 6, including some who had injured...
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Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations that we arrive at a full understanding of ourselves as Beings....
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“The day after,” has been a shorthand since the start of the war for what will happen in Gaza once the war is over. It would more fittingly be called “the days after,” since whoever governs Gaza will also have to grapple with the problem of who will rebuild it and how, and what can...
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Piotr Florczyk in conversation with Ange Mlinko, occasioned by the release of Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Mlinko’s collection of literary essays, out now from Oxford University Press. It seems the number of books in print increases every year — a condition which never ceases to surprise me; not long ago the demise of...
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Over the past month and change, every day has brought some new and shocking change to the country where I was born. The mass pardon of domestic terrorists. Corruption charges dropped against the mayor of New York City, in exchange for cooperation with ICE. The explicit targeting of racial and sexual minorities, the resumption of...
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Like always, my heart lurched when I stepped off the jet bridge and into Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. I’ve crossed the walkway to customs so many times over the past two decades and in that time the space has hardly changed at all. This time was no different. What was new was the surge of...
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Minutes after the hostage agreement was signed between Hamas and Israel, the streets of the West Bank, several Arab capitals, and even some European cities echoed with chants celebrating Hamas’ “victory.” A “victory” paid for with the lives of at least 50,000 people, 110,000 wounded, and with the utter destruction of over seventy-five percent of...
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Consciously at least, I meant to present myself in court on the fourth and last day of the first instance in 2022. I must have silenced my alarm while half asleep because I woke to a call from my lawyer. “Restez à la maison,” she said: “Stay home. It’s just the defense’s closing arguments.” I...
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Thirty-five years ago, a Canadian named Ursula Franklin offered a dark prophecy. She predicted that unfettered technological development could strip us of the capacity to honor our fellow citizens’ very humanity. In such a world, she taught, democracy will become increasingly untenable — because liberal humanism is impossible to cultivate in a society dominated by...
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Thousands of minutes and hours, deeds and words, specifications, delusions, mistakes without end, longing, flesh — it takes so much to create a single person — that he be, that he survives, that he feels a hand on his shoulder, that others say to him ‘It is you.’ And it is so easy for him...
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In the more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the question of how art can respond to barbarism has taken on urgent significance. Theodor Adorno famously said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Today, in the aftermath of atrocities like Mariupol, artists in Ukraine have to ask themselves whether...
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This essay is the first installment of Morten Høi Jensen’s Mannhood Sidebar Series on all things related to Thomas Mann, which will continue throughout 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth. On January 4, 1939, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig arrived at a stately, imposing home on 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New...
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I enjoyed reading Katherine C. Epstein’s article “Historians Killing History” in the fall 2024 issue of Liberties, but as a fellow historian, I’d like to offer a friendly dissent. Epstein argues that the historical profession is currently suffering from a “collapse of scholarly standards” that has had grievous consequences, both for the field of history...
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In his latest column for The New York Times, heroically titled “Done With Never Trump,” Bret Stephens has saved historians hours of work. In just a few hundred words, he has demonstrated how a former Never Trump Conservative justifies defection. It is tempting to read the article as an exercise in hackneyed excuses, as if...
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1 Few works of art have captured the cesspool that is our social media public square as forcefully as this year’s “Red Rooms,” by Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante. The movie introduces us to Kelly-Anne, (played by a frightening Juliette Gariépy) whose life is governed by her own strict control, assisted by an AI she herself...
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It’s been a messy year. The future doesn’t look bright. Blue Sky beckons users to abandon X as if we still ahve agency to distance ourselves from Musk’s reach. For five days an assassin with perfectly coiffed eyebrows was on the loose, scattering Monopoly money behind him like a hoodied folk hero. People tut-tutting in...
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My favorite moment in the Kamala Harris campaign was when she gave a lengthy disquisition at Fordham University about how Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance can help the electorate better conceptualize the power of right-wing propaganda in a “post-truth” society. Even if Harris’s Derridean analysis represents the high-water mark of her electoral effort, it is...
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To understand bigotry, study the bigot not its victim. The exercise is a repudiation of the poison but it is also rational: bigotry is fostered, nurtured, and manifested by all manner of factors which affix to a victim – usually (but not always) a vulnerable one – but which have little to do with them....
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Empathy with the victor benefits the rulers. ...
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When the anti-republican Action Française group wanted to incite a revolution against democracy in Paris in 1934, they chose to perform a “freely” translated version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s 1608 play about a tragic Roman tyrant. Coriolanus has plenty of useful material for the demotically agitating translator. Audience riots ensued. Both the socialists and the fascists...
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After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of art something has been gained for the human race and “the work of art transmits an...
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This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X. Under various and ever-shifting policies curtailing access to asylum, dating back to the Trump administration and continuing through that of Biden, United States-bound refugees from all...
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WITH Hamze Awawde; Zack Beauchamp; Francesca Dannunzio; Shay Khatiri; Jessica Pishko; Matthew Sitman; A.E. Stallings; Rafia Zakaria An American Wakes Up in Athens, Greece After the 2024 Elections A.E. Stallings’ book Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon will be published in 2025....
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It’s almost over. This week, hundreds of millions of citizens are off to the polls to play their part in the great American exploding gender reveal party. It’s the most consequential election in living memory. Again. and the whole world is watching through its fingers. Of course we are. No other nation with equivalent international hit...
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In October, Trump announced he would hold a rally on the final Saturday of his campaign in Salem, Virginia. The decision to come to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians made no strategic sense: if Trump comes even close to winning the state the election will have been a rout, and the...
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In order to attend press screenings at the New York Film Festival, you have to scan in your ID badge. These badges are color-coded, with orange and red representing high value members of the industry and press who always get in; the rest of us greens have to line up and hope the Walter Reade...
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I will enter a polling station in Washington, D.C., in several days and vote for the first time. The thought of filling in a ballot may be mundane for millions of Americans who have done it (or forgotten or merely not bothered to do it) routinely every two or four years for all of their...
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The lives of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza was reduced to hell at the moment Hamas launched their attack on the morning of Oct 7th, 2023. At sunrise that day, as news of Hamas’ attack on Israel spread across Gaza, the people knew what was coming. People in Gaza started preparing themselves for the horrors...
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A friend of mine once asked me why I get so worked up about Jewish Currents, a left-wing American magazine known for airing anti-Zionist views. Of all the actors large and small that help shape the narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why care about a magazine based in Long Island with a few thousand subscribers? ...
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I had the dream again — in it, dad was still alive and was hiding somewhere in the house. Usually in the attic by the box fan — sitting under a light bulb, silent and watchful and bald, like some wise nesting bird. Other times, he was wedged up behind the top shelves of my...
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One of the strangest things about modern American reality — marked as it is by a multitude of threatening cataclysms (environmental, nuclear, fascist) that seem to loom closer all the time — is that it is funny. Who can deny that the geriatric TV showman, who looks like a cartoon character, pumping his fists and...
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Child refugees and the children of refugees experience a unique longing for a place they never knew. But they also long for a place that does not exist. Our parents in exile create an elaborate fantasy of what their homeland could have been and make it real with the strength of their desires. Because when...
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David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Despite the relative obscurity of even successful writers, especially those most regarded for literary fiction, Wallace continues to generate...
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“[T]he ‘kids’, as the phrase goes, ‘got to me.'” Thus concluded Irving Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope. The book, which appeared in 1982, includes reflections on his conflicts with the New Left during the 60s. All through that decade Howe upheld the banner of democratic socialism, a socialism deeply informed by liberal values, against...
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Print the legend On July 18, 1953, a painfully shy recent high school graduate walked into the Memphis Recording Service, a storefront studio perched at 706 Union Ave in Memphis. The outer office contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and 36-year-old Marion Keisker, who, among her many other duties, screened hopeful musicians who came through...
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The presidential election of 2024 is in fact the unfolding of the rolling coup d’état that began in earnest four years ago. To imagine otherwise is to normalize what is patently abnormal and thus to falsify the crisis. It is to comprehend our politics as much of the political media does, clinging to shattered institutional...
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In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. The king, Charles II, had made clear through his policies and actions that he sought to centralize control by establishing an...
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The first time the drone strikes intensified it was just after Thanksgiving, and I was already a bit depressed to have celebrated with Crimean Tatar food rather than turkey and cranberry sauce. That Friday night, like the one before, air alerts were on for hours. This time felt different. My roommate slept in the hallway...
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The most precious object for a person trapped in hell is a means of navigation. This is true of physical misery and emotional or psychological misery, and it is true both literally and figuratively. Navigation is vital. Keep that in mind. If someone in Washington, DC, where I live, was tempted to visit the village...
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In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its museums; or perhaps...
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For well over a century, the favored metaphor for Balkan trouble has been fire. A cartoon from the eve of World War I depicts the Great Powers — Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary — standing atop a cauldron of boiling water, struggling to contain the “Balkan troubles” therein. A few decades before that, Otto...
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Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box...
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“We must stem the tide of malice,” Mary Bennet says to her sister Elizabeth after they learn that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, has run off to London with Mr. Wickham, “and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation.” Elizabeth can only “[lift] up her eyes in amazement” at this...
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My family left Capri sipping cordials. Aboard the skipper, alongside us, was a young couple from the Southeastern U.S. The husband chatted up my father. He was in his late thirties, working as a financial broker-dealer in North Georgia, and feeling the ceiling. His own zip and zeal, he felt, were underfoaming, and the rural...
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Now you’re telling me You’re not nostalgic Then give me another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things vague — Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust” I In the autumn of 2018, I received from an estranged family member in Vienna some documents once belonging to my great-grandmother,...
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My face mask is strapped wrong such that the yellow bands strain awkwardly on the back of my skull, bunching up my hair into a silly-looking poof, but I don’t notice because there’s a whirring machine in front of me, looping a pad of gray foam in quick circles, ready to brush something. I am...
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You can trust my characters. Whatever else they are — and they’re not always nice — at least they’re upfront. They don’t hide anything. They scream, laugh, cry, jump around and get drunk. But our society makes people into hidden people — stiff upper lip, keep quiet, don’t show it. I suppose if there is...
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My mother has charged me with transferring my father’s ashes from the cardboard box they have been sitting in for years into a proper urn. We sit together in the wood-paneled living room, littered with packing peanuts and a collection of ornamental urns and mini-urns she has bought on eBay. “Well what do you think?”...
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